Second Opinion: It’s no wonder the public get so confused about healthy food choices

It's no wonder the public get so confused about what constitutes a healthy diet. Conflicting expert advice and sly marketing ploys make buying processed and pre-packaged food a baffling experience. Now we know why. A new study from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), PRICE Lab: An Investigation of Consumers' Capabilities with Complex Products, found that "consumers have limited capacity for attending to and processing information" when selecting various products.

Behavioural economists conducted experiments with Irish consumers aged 18-70 years designed to find out when product information becomes too complex for consumers to choose accurately between good products and bad ones. “Once consumers had to take into account more than two or three different factors simultaneously their ability to distinguish [between]good and bad deals became strikingly imprecise.”

Researchers concluded: “a product might be considered ‘complex’ once consumers must take into account more than two or three factors simultaneously in order to judge whether a deal is good or bad”. Whether product information was supplied numerically or by category did not alter the level of imprecision and bias in consumers’ decisions, “the results were essentially the same”.

What mattered was that performance about judging value for money was related to the number of factors consumers had to evaluate simultaneously. More expensive products were overvalued and cheaper ones were undervalued. People with high levels of numeracy and educational attainment performed slightly better than those without, but the improvement was small. Consumers’ performance was the same for familiar products as for unfamiliar ones.

Although the ESRI did not study performance in relation to shopping for, and choosing, food products, the research findings are very relevant to food packaging and labelling.

I visited some local supermarkets to compare labels and investigate marketing ploys. A majority of packaged food products had at least three front-of-pack health and wellbeing messages as well as detailed ingredient labels on the back. Children’s porridge (children do not need special cereal) had four “health” claims on the front including “grow happy”, “the good stuff”, “contains 12 vitamins and minerals” and “no added sugar”. The label at the back informs parents that the product has only 38 per cent oats and 30g of sugar per 100g.

Not such a good buy then when compared to the real thing. Normal porridge is 100 per cent oats with no added sugar and is a much healthier product. It is also far cheaper. On the same shelf, children’s drinks were labelled “100 per cent organic”, “health drink for kids” and “developed with mums and nutritionists”. Unfortunately, most were also full of sugar. Dairy spreads with the word “buttery” on the front of the container had only 4 per cent milk and no butter whatsoever. These are just some examples of how food producers set out to baffle consumers who need to be sceptical about labels.

Conflicting advice from experts adds to the confusion. A recent report from the Public Health Collaboration (PHC) in the UK, Healthy Eating Guidelines and Weight Loss: Advice for the United Kingdom, noted "saturated fats are not associated with all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, ischemic stroke, or type 2 diabetes." The PHC wants consumers to consume food in its natural form, "however much saturated fat it contains". They call this approach to eating "The Real Food Lifestyle" which means not counting calories, eating real food until you are satisfied, avoiding fake [highly processed] food and being active every day. The PHC report was widely criticised by experts who have been pushing the low-fat message but the new advice sounds good to me.

Adopting a real food lifestyle is easier said than done. The government needs to step in with public policies to help consumers interpret labels and be sceptical about marketing ploys.

Many experts favour a “traffic light” labelling system instead of the more complex “guideline daily amount GDA” system used in Ireland but research shows that consumers find both systems confusing because front-of-pack claims differ from rear-of-pack labels. The ESRI report recommends some policies that might work and which could easily be applied to food packaging.

These include the provision of independent, transparent, price comparison websites, and mandated label simplification where food producers must provide information in a simplified and standard format determined by regulation. The Healthy Weight for Ireland strategy will be launched soon. Will it work? Not unless the food industry is forced by legislation to produce healthier products and stop baffling shoppers with misleading marketing tactics.

Jacky Jones is a former HSE regional manager of health promotion and a member of Healthy Ireland Council.

drjackyjones@gmail.com